Mayor stayed mum on last-resort plans

Published 5:30 am, Sunday, September 25, 2005

Mayor stayed mum on last-resort plans

White, Noriega worked quietly to avoid a repeat of Superdome scene

As Hurricane Rita bore down on the Gulf Coast last week, Mayor Bill White asked State Rep. Rick Noriega to set up an elaborate system of secret, last-resort shelters across the city.

When the storm raked the city Friday night, the makeshift shelters in Houston Independent School District buildings protected more than 5,000 stranded, homeless or otherwise needy people from a wet, windy night on the streets.

White, who was trying to encourage voluntary evacuation, had said repeatedly that the city wouldn't open last-minute shelters. He said Saturday that he kept Noriega's mission quiet to avoid a mass — and potentially dangerous — 11th-hour migration to shelters.

"We avoided the type of situation you saw during Katrina," he said, referring to storm victims being stranded for days under filthy conditions in the Louisiana Superdome and other shelters.

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Noriega said that some people, such as those who called the 311 help line and said they didn't have transportation or safe shelter, simply needed the last-ditch help.

"With an evacuation plan, you're not going to get 100 percent," said Noriega, who also led the efforts to house Hurricane Katrina evacuees at the George R. Brown Convention Center.

"You're still going to have that person who, at the very last minute, says, 'Oh, heck, I need help.' "

Most of the people left the shelters as the storm's wind and rain subsided Saturday morning, officials said.

But at least 400 remained later Saturday at Delmar Stadium Fieldhouse, a domed structure on Mangum road, as school district officials and the American Red Cross decided what to do with them.

They expressed mixed emotions as they waited in the dim, hot high school gymnasium.

A few, interviewed before HISD officials ordered a Chronicle reporter and photographer out of the facility, were grateful they were spared weathering the storm outdoors.

Others felt abandoned at the crowded site, saying they didn't know when they would leave or where they would go.

"These aren't affluent people, and they were treated with less respect than they should have," said Beaumont evacuee Dennis Daniels.

He pointed to people wearing bandages or sitting in wheelchairs, waiting outside the building in the early afternoon as the weather altered between sunshine and drizzle.

"We were inundated with people who came to Ben Taub thinking it was a shelter," said Carol Oddo, Harris County Hospital District spokeswoman. "No one was discharged from the hospital who wasn't ready to go."

Others at the shelters, officials said, had been stranded on freeways in disabled cars or found wandering the streets in the hours before the storm came ashore.

Noriega said Red Cross officials were reluctant to take in the remaining people, perhaps because the agency's resources were stretched thin.

The Red Cross has operated numerous shelters here and elsewhere, first for evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, which hit the New Orleans area Aug. 29, and now for Hurricane Rita's displaced. Harris County Judge Robert Eckels said 15,000 people stayed in Red Cross shelters Friday night.

So school employees drove people around the city, dropping them off at their desired locations after clearing out the facility.

The shelters opened after a two-day dash by Noriega and city, school and Metro officials.